By Emir Sader on July 6, 2021
The new strategy of the Latin American right wing is to sabotage liberal democracy from within. This is how it corrupted democracy in Brazil and threw the country into the worst crisis in its history, paid for not only with hunger and poverty, but also with more than 500,000 dead.
The most effective way to corrupt liberal democracy is through money. It is money that feeds the fortunes of millionaires, who are the last great bastion that sustains genocide. It is money that allows the big monopoly groups to continue to dominate the media. It is money that promotes a lifestyle and consumption based on outrageously luxurious lifestyles, in the middle of the most unequal country in the most unequal continent in the world, which is Brazil.
The reign of money, which dominates the neoliberal model that still prevails in the world today, is consolidated at the expense of its opposite: the right of people, the right of all. The right to life, food, housing, work, leisure. Neoliberalism is the reign of money, wealth, financial speculation. It is the kind of politics that rewards what does not produce and does not speculate on the stock markets, whose values are material and not ethical.
Today, many people, including many of those who directly or indirectly elected Bolsonaro, are speaking out in favor of democracy. They realize that it is not even possible to defend people’s lives, without democracy, without the will of the majority being imposed. They realize that with a cowardly Judiciary in the face of genocide, which is not even willing to defend people’s lives, Brazil’s worst crisis will not be overcome.
Several, of the so-called third way or any other way, pronounce themselves in favor of democracy, but say nothing or, worse, speak in favor of neoliberalism. They continue to believe that the State is a bad manager, inefficient, corrupt, to the point of supporting the privatization of Eletrobrás and others, which enriches large private companies and responds, in good measure, to the support of the richest to the government.
One cannot be in favor of democracy and neoliberalism at the same time. In normal conditions of democratic dispute, neoliberalism is defeated, as it was in Argentina and Bolivia. As it would have been in 2018, when Lula would have won the elections in the first round, by all polls, but was prevented from being a candidate, with the action and complicity of the Judiciary and the media and the satisfaction of the big millionaires.
Either the kingdom of money or the kingdom of rights. Either democracy or neoliberalism. Lula can only restore democracy, because at the same time he is against the spending ceiling, key to the fiscal adjustments of neoliberalism.
It is only possible to rescue democracy in Brazil with Lula, because he is the person who personifies the governments that were, at the same time, democratic and anti-neoliberal.
Democracy is the kingdom of rights, totally incompatible with the kingdom of money!
Source: La Pupila Insomne, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – English